Amazon Aurora Serverless MySQL 5.6 can now be accessed using the built-in Data API enabling you to access Aurora Serverless with web services-based applications, including AWS Lambda, AWS AppSync, and AWS Cloud9 

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis announces improved maintenance update procedures for auto failover enabled clusters. You can now benefit from improved availability during patching, updates and other maintenance related activities that involve planned node replacements. For Redis Cluster configurations that are set up to use Redis Cluster clients, the planned node replacements will now complete while the cluster serves incoming write requests. For non-Redis Cluster configurations, you may notice a brief write interruption, of up to a few seconds, associated with DNS update. 

Starting today, the Amplify CLI (part of the open source Amplify Framework) includes support for adding an AWS Lambda function to your AWS AppSync API using the GraphQL Transformer and the new @function directive. The GraphQL Transformer, included in the Amplify CLI, provides a simple to use interface that helps developers quickly create scalable web and mobile backends on AWS. 

Amazon MSK, an AWS streaming data service that manages Apache Kafka’s (Kafka) infrastructure and operations is now generally available. Amazon MSK makes it easy for developers and DevOps managers to build and run production applications on Kafka without needing significant Kafka and Apache ZooKeeper operational expertise.

Hibernating your Amazon EC2 Instances is now easier then ever. You can now enable Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Encryption by Default, to ensure all new EBS volumes created in your account are encrypted. To enable Hibernation, you no longer have to create an encrypted copy of the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) before launching an instance. Alternatively, you can also now specify encryption intent at launch (with unencrypted AMI or snapshot) and enable hibernation at the same time (see link).  

Database Activity Streams for Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility provides a near real-time data stream of the database activity in your relational database to help you monitor activity. When integrated with third party database activity monitoring tools, Database Activity Streams can monitor and audit database activity to provide safeguards for your database and help meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

AWS IoT Things Graph is a fully managed service that makes it easier and faster to build IoT applications by visually connecting different devices and web services with little to no code. IoT applications are being built today using a variety of devices and web services to automate tasks for a rapidly expanding range of use cases like smart homes, manufacturing, and energy management. With AWS IoT Things Graph, customers can focus on the logic and functionality of their smart home or industrial IoT applications instead of dealing with the low-level details of integrating devices and services.

You can now take crash-consistent snapshots of multiple Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes attached to an EC2 instance with a single API call. You can also use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) to automate the multi-volume snapshot management via creating lifecycle policies.

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Textract, which has been in preview since re:invent 2018. Amazon Textract is a managed machine learning service that automatically extracts text and structured data from virtually any document. Customers use Amazon Textract to quickly automate document workflows, processing millions of document pages in a few hours.

You can now use AWS DataSync to automatically, efficiently, and securely copy files between two Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) resources, including file systems in different AWS Regions and ones owned by different AWS accounts.  Using DataSync to copy data between EFS file systems, you can perform one-time migrations, periodic ingest for distributed workloads, or automate replication for data protection and recovery, at speeds up to 10 times faster than open-source tools.